It's no secret that Steam is an incredibly popular distribution platform on PC, and Valve's Tom Giardino, who works in business development at the company, spoke at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this week about its growth (via GeekWire), revealing some pretty impressive numbers.
Firstly, there are 67 million monthly active players on the platform, with is quite a bit more than the 53 million users reported for Xbox Live. On top of this, Steam also has 33 million daily active players, and 14 million concurrent users per day at peak on average, which is up from 8.4 million in 2015.
Giardino also revealed that since January 2016 there have been 27 million first-time buyers on Steam, i.e. those who created an account and bought a game/made a transaction, which equates to almost 1.5 million users a month. This growth also applies to Asia, too, as their percentage of Steam's worldwide sales has grown to 17%, largely helped by users in Korea, China, and Japan.
What's the cause for Steam's success and growth though? Well, Giardino believes it to be Valve's effort to localise stores and accept more payment methods, but more important is the diversity of content on Steam, which he says is "kind of astounding".
How big can Steam grow in the future?
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